Geochemistry of high H2 and CH4 vent fluids issuing from ultramafic rocks at the Rainbow hydrothermal field (36°14'N, MAR)

Geochemistry of subduction zone serpentinites: A review

Serpentinization of abyssal peridotites at mid-ocean ridges

http://www.gm.univ-montp2.fr/spip/IMG/pdf/Paulick_CG_06.pdf

Geochemistry of abyssal peridotites (Mid-Atlantic Ridge, 15°20'N, ODP Leg 209): Implications for fluid/rock interaction in slow spreading environments

For life to have emerged from CO2, rocks, and water on the early Earth, a sustained source of chemically transducible energy was essential. The serpentinization process is emerging as an increasingly likely source of that energy. Serpentinization of ultramafic crust would have continuously supplied hydrogen, methane, minor formate, and ammonia, as well as calcium and traces of acetate, molybdenum and tungsten, to off-ridge alkaline hydrothermal springs that interfaced with the metal-rich carbonic Hadean Ocean. Silica and bisulfide were also delivered to these springs where cherts and sulfides were intersected by the alkaline solutions. The proton and redox gradients so generated represent a rich source of naturally produced chemiosmotic energy, stemming from geochemistry that merely had to be tapped, rather than induced, by the earliest biochemical systems. Hydrothermal mounds accumulating at similar sites in today’s oceans offer conceptual and experimental models for the chemistry germane to the emergence of life, although the ubiquity of microbial communities at such sites in addition to our oxygenated atmosphere preclude an exact analogy.

/pdf/serpentinization-as-a-source-of-energy-at-the-origin-of-life-35sp85jan4.pdf

Serpentinization as a source of energy at the origin of life.

The rainbow vent fluids (36°14′N, MAR): the influence of ultramafic rocks and phase separation on trace metal content in Mid-Atlantic Ridge hydrothermal fluids

C.F Jove Colon

Papers

The rainbow vent fluids (36°14′N, MAR): the influence of ultramafic rocks and phase separation on trace metal content in Mid-Atlantic Ridge hydrothermal fluids